Bookworm Page 4

  This kind of thing shouldn’t happen to a Greenaway fan. I slammed the book shut and sat quietly, waiting for the 1970s to end so that my parents would stop abandoning me to terrors like this.

  Rackham and I have managed a rapprochement since. But I keep my wits about me. When I am in the rambling Norfolk farmhouse of my dreams, with the freedom at last to shelve my entire book collection as it should be shelved, I will file a Greenaway volume somewhere nearby to counteract the horrors lurking within. Other people plan retirement cruises and look forward to dandling grandchildren on their knees. This is what I do.

  The two world wars disrupted everything, of course, as wars do, and the accompanying shortages and austerity dampened publishing’s lustre for a while. But when mental and practical resources began to return, a new generation of children’s picture-book authors and illustrators began to make its presence felt.

  One of its members was Maurice Sendak.

  Sendak

  I usually remember the first time and place I meet a book. Not with this one. I’ve no idea where or when I first met Where the Wild Things Are, except that I must have been very young and that there were other children somewhere, vaguely, in the distance carrying on with their normal lives as I held the book open at the double-page spread in the middle. The wild rumpus fills it from edge to edge as Max’s imaginary world effaces reality, just as the book was effacing mine. The wild things’ yellow eyes stared out at me, daring me to shut the book, daring me to keep reading.

  It was the darkest book I had ever seen. Literally so because it was all heavy greens, cross-hatched browns and shadowy greys (which really make monstrous yellow eyes pop), and metaphorically because – well, because Sendak’s motivating force had always been his ‘great curiosity about childhood as a state of being and how all children manage to get through childhood from one day to the next, how they defeat boredom, fear, pain and anxiety, and find joy’. In Wild Things he went rootling round in his own and the collective subconscious for answers.

  Max, in his wolf suit, begins the story – as some long-buried, possibly still bruised part of you probably knows – by ‘making mischief of one kind and another’ and is sent to bed without his supper and with the admonishment ‘Wild thing!’ Soon Max’s room is transformed into a jungle and he sets sail ‘in and out of weeks’ to a land full of wild things, becomes their king and bids ‘the wild rumpus start!’ But unexpectedly soon he has had enough and sails back to where ‘someone loved him best of all’. He is restored to his room and finds supper waiting for him – still, famously, hot.

  It’s a book about abandonment, about testing the depth and strength of feelings and learning to control them. It’s a book about love and hate and power and powerlessness and the wild things they make us do and the wild places they open up within us. It’s about the power of dream worlds and the porousness of the boundary between them and reality for children. A drawing of a monster on Max’s bedroom wall foreshadows the coming creatures. The same crescent moon hangs in the sky outside his room and over the land where the wild things are (at least until the wild rumpus starts, when it becomes – because it would, wouldn’t it? – full). He remains in his wolf suit in both worlds, but the hood slips off as he returns home and his animal fury (and freedom?) abates.

  Sendak drew his inspiration for the wild things themselves from the memory of his older Jewish relatives coming to visit. They couldn’t speak English and ‘they grabbed and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do’. He and his siblings formulated the theory that, as their mother’s cooking was so terrible, the relatives could well be planning to eat them instead. ‘We couldn’t taste any worse than what she was preparing.’ There was also a dash of King Kong in there too. A friend of Sendak’s once pointed out that the composition of one of the illustrations exactly matched a scene from the film Sendak saw as a child in the 1930s.

  It was lauded by many – and won that year’s Caldecott Medal – but was also accused of being too frightening for children; an inappropriate and unhelpful acknowledgement of unspoken fears. Other critics seemed simply to miss the point entirely. The reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised the illustrations but not the ‘pointless and confusing story’. And some parents didn’t seem to know what to think. One woman told Sendak she had read it to her daughter ten times and the girl had screamed every time. Why, Sendak wondered, had she kept on if her daughter had found it so distressing? ‘It’s a Caldecott book!’ the woman replied. ‘She’s supposed to like it.’fn2

  But there were, and have been ever since, enough fans like the eight-year-old boy who wrote to him soon after the book’s publication to ask how much it cost to travel to the wild things. ‘Because if it’s not too expensive, my sister and I would like to go there for the summer.’

  Sendak’s favourite fan, though, was a little boy who sent him a card with a little drawing on it. Out of respect for a fellow artist, Sendak went to some trouble with his reply and included a little drawing of his own – of a wild thing – to the boy. He got a letter back from the boy’s mother which said ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ Sendak considered it the highest compliment he had ever been paid. ‘He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.’

  And I couldn’t even bring myself to press my face against a Shirley Hughes picture. Go Jim. You go, son, for all of us.

  Maurice Sendak. The author–illustrator nonpareil.

  Where the Wild Things Are landed in my childhood with as little warning and as big an impact as it did in the world of children’s books when it was first published in 1963.

  Its creator had grown up as the sickly son of a tailor in Brooklyn who started drawing to pass the time (on the backs of the cardboard stiffeners his father packed each finished shirt around). He had come to prominence as an illustrator in the fifties with A Hole Is To Dig by Ruth Krauss, a collection of genuine definitions (‘Toes are to wiggle’, ‘Hats are to wear on a train’) she had gathered from real children and which were crying out for accompanying drawings that could do unsentimental justice to their straightforward innocence.

  Four years later, Sendak had taken the leap into writing as well as illustrating, with Kenny’s Window, Very Far Away, The Sign on Rosie’s Door and the Nutshell Library. All of them have distinctively Sendakian heroes and heroines, who are by turns sulky, angry, passive, loveable and charming but always fully, uncompromisingly themselves. And they share that lovely, chunky look of all his child characters, which Sendak once described as ‘look[ing] as if they’ve been hit on the head and hit so hard they weren’t ever going to grow any more’. He attributed it to the slightly hunched look that he had seen in many of his childhood companions, developed in unconscious defence against the vicissitudes of immigrant life in 1930s Brooklyn. Whatever the inspiration, you can always tell a Sendak child from its low centre of gravity and the sense that it would take the application of severe physical force to deflect it from its goal. As a child who spent much of every morning being flung out of the way by children markedly younger than myself before I reached the succour of the book-bin corner, I admired them very much.

  All his books had done well and Sendak was respected in his field. Then came the wild things that would make him a legend.

  For a few years after Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak concentrated again on illustrating other people’s work, including traditional nursery rhymes, a fairy tale by George Macdonald and stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and writing only one book of his own, Higglety-Pigglety Pop, an expansion of the Samuel Goodrich rhyme with his dog, Jennie, who had recently died, lovingly recreated in the starring role.

  Then in 1970, he wrote and illustrated In the Night Kitchen.

  From the moment Dad first put it into my hands I loved In the Night Kitchen without reservation. The story of Mickey’s adventures as he falls out of bed, through the starry sky into the mad, nocturnal world of some friendly but c
ommitted bakers bent on making him into a Mickey cake until he escapes in a cake plane and goes for a swim in a massive bottle of milk before returning safely home to bed, fascinated me more deeply and in a different way from any book before, and quite possibly since. With its impressionistic style and dreamlike logic it was the first that spoke to my non-rational mind, and the nameless power it held over me almost frightened me. It was elusive, slippery – I knew the story didn’t make ‘proper’ sense and yet, and yet, and yet … despite this (I thought then), and because of this (I think now), it was endlessly compelling.

  Until In the Night Kitchen I had been a purely, almost pathologically rational child (and my mother was always vigilant for signs of whimsy amongst her young) but Mickey opened up another part of my mind, where things could make sense despite not depending on causes, resulting in foreseeable consequences or being wholly resolvable into words. I used to long to visit the night kitchen so much that I wondered whether the force of my desire might one day cause the comic-book-style panels to burst their bounds, swell up around me like the cake batter did around Mickey, and swallow me whole. The thought made me ecstatic and anxious. I wanted to go, but not to leave my family behind. Luckily it never happened. The panels held firm, time and space remained as they should, and I was never forced to make a difficult choice.

  In the Night Kitchen was born out of the moment Sendak looked at the rhymes he had selected for a Mother Goose collection he wanted to illustrate and realised that they were all, one way or another, about food. Then he remembered an advertising slogan for the Sunshine Bakers that had annoyed him in childhood; ‘We bake while you sleep!’ it said. The young Sendak – who remained easily and richly infuriated all his life – thought this was ‘the most sadistic thing in the world, because all I wanted to do was stay up and watch!’ In the Night Kitchen, he once noted with satisfaction, ‘was a sort of vendetta book’.

  Not that there is any trace of hostility or mean-spiritedness in the book. It is a glorious experience, the book in which you can most feel the truth and effect of what Sendak called his ‘dual apperception’ – the way in which all his adult life events were often heightened by the fact that he experienced them simultaneously as the child he had been would too (‘He still exists somewhere [in me] in the most graphic, plastic, physical way’). Into the kitchen are poured all Sendak’s memories of the 1930s films that weren’t King Kong (everything from Busby Berkeley extravaganzas to screwball comedies can be felt in the New York skyline composed of bags of flour, bottles, shakers, cartons of shortening and in the madcap joy that suffuses everything – plus, of course, there is that indefatigable trio of Laurel and Hardyesque cooks, who were animals until Sendak happened across a rerun of the duo’s old films while he was working), of visiting the 1939 New York World’s Fair (New York itself, he said, was always a magical land forever glittering on the far side of the bridge from his home in Brooklyn), his love of comic books (whose layout, flat colours and bold contrasts Night Kitchen mirrors) and the happier elements of his childhood. Instead of mutated relatives, there are authentic, homely period details like the Bakelite radio console (the ‘Jennie’ written on it is another memorial to his beloved late dog), the fringed curtains and the almost tangible warmth of the kitchen and weirdly cosy domesticity of that reimagined skyline.

  Nothing perhaps illustrates the quintessence of Sendak more than the fact that, although he loved it (‘I’m mad for it,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘and it’s mad’), he found the book that was most informed by happiness the most painful to produce. ‘It comes from the direct middle of me,’ he wrote in the same letter, ‘and it hurt like hell extracting it … birth-delivery type pains.’

  As with Wild Things, some critics poked their noses into the crib and recoiled at what they found there. One New York reviewer was perturbed by the sensuousness of Mickey’s naked wallowing in dough and milk. ‘Some’, he said, ‘might interpret [it] as a masturbatory fantasy.’ Hmm. Okay. I guess … some might.

  A German critic wondered whether the dough suit Mickey wears had connections, conscious or subconscious, to ‘doughboys’ – as US soldiers and Marines were commonly nicknamed during Sendak’s youth, before ‘GI’ became the popular term during the Second World War – and whether the oven was a reference to concentration camps. Others were simply concerned that, as one put it, ‘being baked in a cake is more disturbing than any wild creature’, or with the mere fact of Mickey’s nudity (which resulted in several librarians adding hand-drawn nappies to our hero in their institutions’ copies). ‘Yet parents take their children to museums where they see Roman statues with their dicks broken off,’ Sendak once mused. ‘You’d think that would frighten them more.’

  Like a lot of criticism, this all tended to reveal more about the critic than the subject supposedly under scrutiny. And of course the book sloughed off detractors and has done pretty well in the half-century since. It has sold millions of copies and allowed who knows how many young readers access to a different part of their brains. It has sent them the message that their dream worlds count too and that not everything needs to make sense right now. What a tremendous gift to give a child.

  My own child won’t give it the time of day. But I read it to him every month or so regardless. Not only is it a Caldecott book, it’s Mummy’s favourite. He should like it. And by God, we will continue until he does.

  Still, I’m giving it a few more years before I make him face Outside Over There. According to Sendak, this was the final panel in a triptych reflecting a child’s developing psyche. In the Night Kitchen was a representation of the toddler mind, thoughts tumbling through space and time, unbounded by fear or rationality. Where the Wild Things Are gives us the four- or five-year-old who is just beginning to wake up to everything around him and wants to explore it, good and bad, for himself. The third book, Sendak promised a friend as he was writing it, would ‘reverberate on triple levels’.

  Outside Over There is a singularly terrifying story about a baby kidnapped by goblins and being rescued, eventually, by the sister on whose babysitting watch he was stolen – an intimation of that moment at the age of about ten or eleven when you begin to sense the horrors of adolescence starting to gather on the horizon.

  I’m not quite ready to talk about Outside Over There yet. I’ve never been so frightened. It works on the same visceral, primeval level that all the most compelling and enduring fairy tales do. In Wild Things, Sendak is careful to walk the line between real fear and temporary insecurity. The wild things have scary yellow eyes, but soft cuddly bodies. They roar and make a fuss but Max tames them easily with a magic trick and quickly becomes their king. The rumpus is wild but ultimately under his control. In Outside Over There, that line is but a dot in the distance. The loss and guilt are real. The jeopardy is real. The malevolence is real. The baby is restored to his family, but everything has shifted. The outside has been inside and things can never be the same again. Maybe the family recovers someday. I hope so. This reader so far has not.

  Speaking of babies … It was around this time that Mum and Dad disappeared for forty-eight hours, exhorting me to be a good girl for Grandma and promising to bring me back a present. I assumed they meant my own copy of Spot the Dog. In fact, it turned out they meant a baby sister. The disruption to my well-ordered routine caused by nursery school was about to fade into complete insignificance. Ah well. At least Grandma and I enjoyed our time together.

  2

  To The Library

  Dr Seuss

  NOWADAYS, CHILDREN ARE prepared for this kind of upheaval with specially written books on the subject – John Burningham’s There’s Going to Be a Baby, perhaps, or Lauren Child’s The New Small Person (to prepare the parents themselves, I recommend Kate Beaton’s King Baby, as succinct yet comprehensive an explanation of the tyranny to which they are about to be subject as you could wish). I suspect, however, that even if they had been around In My Day,fn1 my parents would not have bought any of them. They were,
after all, still only recently down from the north. Native parsimony and a disinclination to indulge in any form of southern softness (that is, attempting to alleviate any of the difficulties, sorrows or infected sores that might be said to lie within life’s natural exigencies with anything other than a Hail Mary, salt or whisky) would have comfortably outweighed their respect for books and learning. A baby arriving and shattering everyone’s peace, quiet and reading time was normal. Gerron wi’ it.

  So we did. But God, she was noisy. Relief came when Dad started taking me with him on his weekly trips to the local library, on Torridon Road. I had been there once before with nursery school, which was about fifty yards down the road, but it had been awful. Everyone (else) ran riot, and, reactionary little fart that I was, it used to make me hot with shame and fury. Looking back, I wish someone had had the wit to crush a little baby Valium into my milk every morning. Everything could have been so much nicer with just a bit of the edge taken off.

  But the library with Dad – a man who spoke only when directly addressed and last initiated a conversation in nineteen sixty-NEVER and was unlikely to try and skid the length of the polished Victorian parquet floor – on a Saturday was wonderful. It had a beautiful dome – duck-egg blue on the inside – that I had no idea then was probably a homage to the British Library’s famous reading room. Clustered in the sunlit area beneath it were a set of comfortable seats round a circular table covered in the day’s newspapers where adults could sit and get abreast of the day’s events. It was cool in summer and huge, curved iron radiators kept the place gorgeously warm in winter. The place wasn’t silent – rather, it was full of what Jeanette Winterson recalling her childhood haunt, Accrington Public Library, called ‘a sense of energetic quiet’. Dad and I would walk together through the heavy, brass-handled doors with stained glass windows, nod silently at each other and then peel off, him to the left and the grown-up books, me to the right and the children’s.